The University of Maryland campus and administrative offices will be closed on December 21, 2018 through January 1, 2019. Media inquiries sent during this time will be responded to as the university reopens.

The University of Maryland has received reports of students with confirmed Adenovirus-associated illness, and are saddened that one of those students recently passed away as a result of the illness. Adenoviruses are common causes of colds, but there are strains that can cause more serious illness. We urge our community to take seriously this strain of a common virus.

The University of Maryland is deeply saddened to learn of the death of one of our students from Adenovirus-associated illness. Our condolences are with Olivia’s family and friends.

Since learning of an isolated case of Adenovirus on November 1, we have been working with the state and local health department to track cases and inform our community how seriously to take cold and flu season - especially for anyone with special health circumstances or a weakened immune system.

Crews are redoubling cleaning efforts in high-touch areas to tackle the spread of viruses, faculty have been given guidance to be flexible with students who are ill, and the Health Center is on high alert, using the state’s best practices for treatment and testing.

We understand that there are concerns from our campus about how the virus spreads. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that no link exists between mold and Adenovirus.

COLLEGE PARK, Md. – A new analysis of research citations by University of Maryland professor of computer science Ben Shneiderman iindicates that the average number of citations a university research paper receives is progressively boosted by having: (1) more than one author; (2) coauthors from multiple U.S. institutions; (3) international coauthors; and, most powerfully, (4) coauthors from business and/or government and/or NGOs.

These and related findings are presented in a new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), in which Shneiderman makes the case for “the superior benefit of what he calls a “Twin-Win Model” for conducting research—a model that encourages the formation of teams that simultaneously pursue the goals of generating breakthrough published research, AND validated, ready to disseminate solutions to real human problems.

Shneiderman—a widely recognized pioneer in human-computer interaction and information visualization and a Distinguished University Professor—found that for UMD researchers a research collaboration with non-academics (business, government and/or NGOs) produced research papers that averaged 20.1 citations, almost seven times the number of citations (3.0) of published research by single-authors. These findings were based on data, through 2016, from the Elsevier SCOPUS database, which holds the metadata on 70 million published papers.

Other “striking” results were that research produced by collaborations among University of Maryland faculty averaged 6.1 citations; UMD researchers collaborations with faculty at other US universities produced papers that averaged 9.2 citations; and UMD researcher collaborations with international faculty raised the average paper citation to 13.9.

In the article, published in the December 10th edition of PNAS, National Academy of Engineering member Shneiderman wrote that SCOPUS data on research output at other top U.S. private and public universities shows this same pattern of substantially higher impact university research when researchers at these institutions co-authored papers with off-campus colleagues.

According to his PNAS paper, evidence shows business professionals also benefit from working with academics. Shneiderman found that SCOPUS data on published research from 12 large corporations during 2012–2016 showed that papers by corporate researchers that also had academic coauthors had almost twice the average citation count (11.7) as papers without academic coauthors (average citations of 6.3). These data provide new evidence in support of the arguments in Shneiderman’s 2016 book The New ABCs of Research: Achieving Breakthrough Collaborations.

“Shneiderman’s newly discovered correlations strongly support this effort,” said Whitehead, who was not involved in this PNAS study. Whitehead and Shneiderman are among a number of academics who helped form the HIBAR Alliance.

In his new PNAS paper, Shneiderman further makes the case for these twin-win university-business collaborations by citing a 2017 study in the journal Science that looked at the relationship between scientific research papers and subsequent patents.

“This study found that patents often cited academic papers, but more importantly, academic papers that are cited by patents get greater attention in the research community,“ he wrote. And he notes this study in Science found that patented inventions that draw directly on scientific advances also were more impactful compared to other patents.

“There is growing evidence that when academics work with business or government partners, they address authentic problems that challenge the research team to produce more potent solutions. Such partnerships often have access to more resources (money, staff, data, etc.), enabling them to take on more substantive problems,” Shneiderman said.

He noted that some academic researchers continue to have reservations about such partnerships. And certainly there are challenges in such collaborations for both university researchers and their collaborators in the private or government sectors. However, many researchers and many universities, including the University of Maryland, have recognized the power and benefits of such partnerships, he said.

COLLEGE PARK, Md.-- Global carbon emissions are set to hit an all-time high in 2018 according to the Global Carbon Project, a group of international researchers focused on global sustainability, including three from the University of Maryland’s Department of Geographical Sciences.

The group issued the 2018 Global Carbon Budget, a report recently published simultaneously in the journals Nature, Earth System Science Data and Environmental Research Letters, which reveals that carbon dioxide emissions are projected to rise more than 2 percent driven by solid growth in the use of coal and sustained growth in oil and gas usage. CO2 emissions have now risen for a second year, after three years of little-to-no growth from 2014 to 2016.

"While fossil fuel emissions continue to rise and dominate the budget, emissions from land use change and terrestrial carbon uptake remain important and highly uncertain," said Geographical Sciences Professor George Hurtt.

Hurtt and Louise Chini, an assistant research professor, provided global land-use data for the study and Ben Poulter, an adjunct professor, contributed estimates of land carbon uptake.

The Global Carbon Project team says the report is a further call to action for governments at the UN Climate Change Conference in Katowice this week. However, the researchers point to changing energy trends and say there is still time to address climate change if efforts to curb carbon emissions rapidly expand in all sectors of the economy.

While almost all countries contributed to the rise in global emissions, the 10 biggest emitters in 2018 are China, the United States, India, Russia, Japan, Germany, Iran, Saudi Arabia, South Korea and Canada. The European Union as a whole region of countries would rank third. However, researchers say the good news is that 19 countries were able to reduce emissions over the past decade and still demonstrated economic growth.

The Global Carbon Project is an international research project within the Future Earth research initiative on global sustainability. It aims to develop a complete picture of the global carbon cycle, including both its biophysical and human dimensions together with the interactions and feedbacks between them. This marks the 13th edition of the annual update that started in 2006.

COLLEGE PARK, Md. – The increasing saltiness and alkalinity of streams and rivers is creating a toxic mix that includes metals and nitrogen-containing compounds and threatens drinking water supplies and ecosystem health nationwide, according to a new University of Maryland-led study.

“The bottom line of our findings is that when humans add salt to waterways, that salt also releases a lot of dangerous collateral chemicals,” said Sujay Kaushal, a professor of geology and lead author of the study.

The new findings build on a study by the same research group earlier this year that described a “Freshwater Salinization Syndrome,” caused by road deicers, fertilizers and other salty compounds that humans indirectly release into waterways.

The new research takes a closer look at the global, national and local consequences of this harmful runoff. Published December 3 in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, the study shows that salty, alkaline freshwater can release a variety of dangerous chemicals that travel together throughout watersheds and have much worse effects than the individual contaminants alone.

The group’s latest work uses data from more than 20 streams in different regions of the U.S., as well as data and field observations from the Washington, D.C., and Baltimore metropolitan areas. Their findings highlight the need for new and more comprehensive regulation and pollution management strategies. “It’s clear that regulatory agencies need to find new ways to address these ‘chemical cocktails’ released by saltier water, rather than looking at individual freshwater pollutants one by one,” said Kaushal.

In one set of observations, the researchers sampled water from the Paint Branch stream near the UMD campus before, during and after a 2017 snowstorm, allowing them to trace the effects of road salt washed into the streams by the melting snow.

“Salt concentrations during the snowstorm were surprisingly high—it was like we were analyzing sea water,” said Kelsey Wood ’15, a geology graduate student at UMD and a co-author of the study. “But we weren’t expecting such a high corresponding peak in metals."

A similar chemical dynamic was evident when Flint, Michigan, switched its primary water source to the Flint River in 2014. The river’s high salt load combined with chemical treatments made the water more corrosive, causing lead to leach from water pipes and creating that city’s well-documented water crisis.

Kaushal’s group began by assessing previously published data from rivers in the U.S., Europe, Canada, Russia, China and Iran, substantially expanding the geographic boundaries of the researchers’ previous work. Their analysis suggests that Freshwater Salinization Syndrome could be a global phenomenon, with the most conclusive support showing a steady trend of increased salt ions in both U.S. and European rivers. These trends trace back at least 50 years, with some data reaching back far enough to support a 100-year trend.

"Given what we are finding, I continue to be surprised by the scope and magnitude of the recent degradation of Earth's surface waters,” said study co-author Gene Likens, president emeritus of the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies and a distinguished research professor at the University of Connecticut. “The formation of novel chemical cocktails is causing deterioration far beyond my expectations."

The increased release of salt into the environment by people can in turn spur stream beds to release more salt, said Kaushal, who also has an appointment in UMD’s Earth System Science Interdisciplinary Center.

“This high salt load not only liberates metals and other contaminants, but there is also evidence that the initial salt pulse releases other salt ions from the streambed and soils, such as magnesium and potassium, which further contribute to keeping overall salt levels high,” he said.

COLLEGE PARK, Md. – A new method co-developed by Anahí Espíndola, an assistant professor of entomology at the University of Maryland, uses the power of machine learning and open-access data to predict species that could be eligible for at-risk status. The research team created and trained a machine learning algorithm to assess more than 150,000 species of plants from all corners of the world, making their project among the largest assessments of conservation risk to date.

According to their results—published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Scienceson December 3, 2018—more than 10 percent of these species are highly likely to qualify for an at-risk classification on the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s (IUCN)Red List of Threatened Species. This list ranks threatened species in one of five categories, from of least concern to critically endangered. It is a powerful tool for researchers and policymakers working to stem the tide of species loss across the globe. But adding even a single species to the list is a large task, demanding countless hours of expensive, rigorous and highly specialized research.

Because of these limitations, a large number of known species have not yet been formally assessed by the IUCN for inclusion on the list. and ranked in one of five categories, from least concern to critically endangered. This deficit is quite apparent in plants: Only about 5 percent of all currently known plant species appear on IUCN’s Red List in any capacity.

Lead author Tara Pelletier, an assistant professor of biology at Radford University, worked with Espíndola to perform the machine learning analysis. The new algorithm they and collaborators created is a predictive model that can be applied to any grouping of species at any scale, from the entire globe to a single city park.

The researchers applied their model to the many thousands of plant species that remain unlisted by IUCN. According to the results, more than 15,000 of the species—roughly 10 percent of the total assessed by the team—have a high probability of qualifying as near-threatened, at a minimum.

Espíndola and her colleagues mapped the data and noted several major geographical trends in the model’s predictions. At-risk species tended to cluster in areas already known for their high native biodiversity, such as the Central American rainforests and southwestern Australia. The model also flagged regions such as California and the southeastern United States, which are home to a large number of endemic species, meaning that these species do not naturally occur anywhere else on Earth.

“When I first started thinking about this project, I suspected that many regions with high diversity would be well-studied and protected. But we found the opposite to be true,” Espíndola said. “Many of the high-diversity areas corresponded to regions with the highest probability of risk. When we saw the maps, we were surprised it was that clear. Endemic species also tend to be more at risk because they are usually confined to smaller areas.”

The model also flagged a few surprising areas not typically known for their biodiversity, such as the southern coast of the Arabian Peninsula, as having a high number of at-risk species. Some of the most imperiled regions have not received enough attention from researchers, according to Espíndola. She hopes that her method can help to fill in some of these knowledge gaps by identifying regions and species in need of further study.

“Let’s say you wanted to assess every species of wild bee on one continent. So you do the assessment and find that only one species is at risk. Now you’ve used all those resources to identify an area with low risk, which is still helpful, but not ideal when resources are limited. We want to help prevent that from happening,” Espíndola said. “Our analysis was global, but the model can be adapted for use at any geographic scale. Everything we’ve done is 100 percent open access, highlighting the power of publicly-available data. We hope people will use our model—and we hope they point out errors and help us fix them, to make it better.”

Espíndola and Pelletier trained the model using GBIF and TRY data from the relatively small group of plant species already on the IUCN Red List. This allowed the researchers to assess and fine-tune the model’s accuracy by checking its predictions against the listed species’ known IUCN risk status. The Red List sorts non-extinct species into one of five classification categories: least concern, near-threatened, vulnerable, endangered and critically endangered.

The researchers applied their model to the many thousands of plant species that remain unlisted by IUCN. According to the results, more than 15,000 of the species—roughly 10 percent of the total assessed by the team—have a high probability of qualifying as near-threatened, at a minimum.

The research paper, “Predicting plant conservation priorities on a global scale,” Tara Pelletier, Bryan Carstens, David Tank, Jack Sullivan and Anahí Espíndola, was published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Scienceson December 3, 2018.

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation (Award Nos. DEB-1457519, DEB-1457726 and EPS-809935), the National Institutes of Health (Award Nos. NCRR 1P20RR016454-01 and NCRR 1P20RR016448-01), DIVERSITAS/Future Earth and the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) Halle-Jena-Leipzig. The content of this article does not necessarily reflect the views of these organizations.

COLLEGE PARK, Md. – Last year a series of severe weather events including the late-winter storm that hit the U.S. Northeast, followed by weather-related damage that closed the U.S.-Mexico Laredo border, and subsequent U.S. landfall hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria contributed to a doubling of global supply chain disruption and, for the first time, made the United States the region most-impacted by such disruption. These impacts, highlighted in a recent report, form part of the impetus for a new partnership between the University of Maryland and software firm Reslinc.

Researchers in UMD’s Earth Systems Science Interdisciplinary Center (ESSIC) and in the Supply Chain Management Center of the Robert H. Smith School of Business have begun work on a prototype of a highly localized “Climate Change Variability/Vulnerability Index.” This new research has been launched in light of the Reslinc report on 2017 impacts, and in the aftermath of massive damage caused by 2018 hurricanes Florence and Michael.

According to ESSIC Assistant Research Professor Michael Gerst, by early 2019, Resilinc will be able to disseminate UMD’s new index as “a critical snapshot of the vulnerability to climate change of the supply chain of an individual business.”

“Climate change varies greatly by location. Thus, the index will become even more important as it will seek to identify which supply chains are prone to the worst parts of a 1.5- or 2-degree Celsius global rise in temperature,” Gerst said.

The need for this new index is underscored by the November 23rd release of a new U.S. National Climate Assessment that says: “Without substantial and sustained global mitigation and regional adaptation efforts, climate change is expected to cause growing losses to American infrastructure and property and impede the rate of economic growth over this century.”

UMD project participant Melissa Kenney, associate research professor in the Earth System Science Interdisciplinary Center and UMD’s Cooperative Institute for Climate and Satellites, emphasized that the index is "designed to provide actionable information to supply chain executives so that they can make better decisions about how to allocate resources to reduce risk.”

Smith School research professor Sandor Boyson, co-director of its Supply Chain Management Center, said: “We have [UMD’s] business school and Silicon Valley-based partner, Resilinc, joining forces with a university-based climate change center [ESSIC] that’s linked directly to the federal government [NOAA] and its long-term climate prediction center.

“We’re positioned to make an index that in its initial phase will score and rank some 10,000 Resilinc-monitored production locations worldwide for vulnerability to climate change,” he said.

The index is expected to bolster Resilinc’s “R-Score,” its standard metric for measuring, benchmarking, and tracking companies’ supply chain risk and resiliency.

“Resilinc has a powerful risk scoring methodology embodied in our R-Score product,” said Bindiya Vakil, CEO of Resilinc Corporation. “But until now, there was no reliable source of climate change data to incorporate into risk assessment. Combining what Resilinc has for risk scoring with the University of Maryland’s ESSIC data represents a big advancement in how supply chain managers can measure and mitigate risk.”

This climate change index project also involves multiple other Smith School researchers and students. For example Smith School CIO Holly Mann and the Office of Smith IT team have built an innovative virtual research infrastructure to support the secure storage and analysis of data across the project portfolio.

This climate change work is part of a larger ongoing academic research partnership between the Smith School and Resilinc.

For UMD’s Earth Systems Science Interdisciplinary Center the project is just part of the its effort to make ‘Earth science’ actionable for the public, including private firms, NGOs and government agencies, explained Michael Maddox, project manager for ESSIC’s Climate Information Responding to User Needs (CIRUN) project.

“There’s a ton of information in terms of Earth and environmental sciences, and it hasn’t been getting into the hands of the user community,” said Maddox. “It is especially significant for us to work with a private company and with the business school as agents that know the users’ wants and needs.”

COLLEGE PARK, Md.-- The new Capital One Tech Incubator, a partnership between the University of Maryland and the McLean, Va.-based Fortune 500 bank, was unveiled Nov. 20 in the new Diamondback Garage, a startup hub behind the Hotel at the University of Maryland. The 7,500-square-foot facility, part of the $2 billion revitalization of the community around the campus known as Greater College Park, provides cutting-edge research opportunities in machine learning and data science as well as a pipeline of job opportunities for students and new talent for industry.

COLLEGE PARK, Md.-- Despite recent efforts in the state of Maryland to reduce school disciplinary measures that exclude children from the classroom, a new report by UMD College of Education researchers finds that students with disabilities and black students were disproportionately suspended from school at all levels.

Across all Maryland public schools, 196 of them—or 14 percent—suspended 25 percent or more of students in one or more subgroups, including racial minorities, English learners and students with disabilities. These high-suspending schools were located throughout the state in both rural and urban areas and in small and large districts, the report said.

“The variation in suspension rates suggests that the school and district a child goes to makes a difference, as some schools are doing things differently in how they handle discipline,” said Gail L. Sunderman, director of the Maryland Equity Project at the UMD College of Education and a co-author of the report with Robert Croninger, associate professor of education and co-director at MEP.

The researchers analyzed data on suspensions and school-level variables from the U.S. Department of Education’s Civil Rights Data Collection and the Maryland State Department of Education.

Among the main findings, close to 60 percent of out-of-school suspensions are of black students, even though they make up only 35 percent of public school enrollment in Maryland. Students with disabilities represent 13 percent of enrollment in Maryland public schools but 25 percent of out-of-school suspensions.

In addition, schools with higher enrollments of black students, students with disabilities, and low-income students and lower enrollments of white, Asian and Hispanic students suspended more students in multiple subgroups.

The study showed that high-suspending schools were less successful academically, had lower graduation rates, lower attendance, higher mobility and fewer experienced teachers. In other words, these were struggling schools.

Maryland adopted new disciplinary guidelines in 2014 that included efforts to make exclusionary discipline a tool of last resort, yet the variability across schools and districts suggest that school- and district-level policies and practices regarding discipline contribute to differences in suspension rates, the report says.

“In some school districts, more than 40 percent of secondary schools were high suspending, which indicates a need for more support in terms of training, leadership or culture change to address exclusionary discipline,” Sunderman said.

She recommended that educators and policymakers investigate the reasons for the disparities in exclusionary discipline, which has long-term consequences for student success.

“Extensive research on the short and long-term consequences of suspensions shows that it leads to lower academic performance, a higher dropout rate, and increased risk of contact with the juvenile justice system,” Sunderman said. “When thinking about school reform, keeping kids in school would really help in improving performance and may reduce the achievement gap. When you’re not in school, you’re not learning.”

COLLEGE PARK, Md. – While nonprofits have benefitted from record highs in volunteer hours and charitable fundraising totals, it’s a case of fewer people doing more, as the percentage of Americans who contribute time and money has fallen to its lowest point in two decades, according to a report released this week by the University of Maryland’s Do Good Institute.

In the first-of-its-kind analysis of data collected by the U.S. Census Bureau and Bureau of Labor Statistics, the report, “Where Are America’s Volunteers?,” examined adult civic engagement with community organizations in all 50 states plus the District of Columbia and 215 metropolitan areas.

From 2002 through 2015, community organizations saw record highs in volunteer hours served (topping out at 8.7 billion in 2014) and in charitable dollars given ($410.02 billion in 2017). But since 2005, the national volunteer rate declined from 28.8 percent to a 15-year low of 24.9 percent in 2015. Similarly, the percentage of Americans giving to nonprofits annually declined from 66.8 percent in 2000 to 55.5 percent in 2014.

“As a nation, we must commit resources and time to the challenging work of putting more Americans back to work improving and engaging with their communities,” said Robert Grimm, director of the Do Good Institute, housed in the School of Public Policy, who co-wrote the report with Nathan Dietz, associate research scholar in the institute.

“Continued declines in community participation will produce detrimental effects for everyone, including greater social isolation, less trust in each other, and poor physical and mental health,” Grimm said.

The report also found that throughout the country, 31 states experienced significant declines in volunteering between 2004 and 2015; none saw a significant increase. Surprisingly, this drop is more prevalent in states historically rich in social capital, meaning highly engaged in social and civic affairs.

The data also suggest that rural and suburban areas, which historically have higher levels of social capital than urban areas, saw the biggest downturns in volunteer rates in recent years. Between 2004 and 2015, they fell more than 5 percentage points in rural areas, and nearly 5 percentage points in suburban areas.

These trends help explain why significant changes in volunteer rate occurred less often in metropolitan areas than at the state level. Between 2004–06 and 2013–15, 57 metro areas experienced a significant decrease, 147 experienced no change, and only 11 produced a significant increase in volunteering.

The analysis also found that volunteer rates tended to decline in metropolitan areas with fewer places to volunteer, in places where people may be less likely to know their neighbors (like large cities with lower homeownership rates and a higher percentage of multi-unit housing), and in places where there is more economic distress (from high unemployment to high poverty rates).

The full report, which contains national, state, and metropolitan-level statistics on volunteeringand giving for adults is available for download here. And the full appendix can be found here.